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While Jobs and Schmidt were having a contest over their mobile platform activation numbers…

Pshaw to all that, says Symbian. The company points out that according to Canalys’ research, there’s 300,000 Symbian devices activated on a daily basis, which equals 109.5 million phones activated annually.

"I long for the good old days when we used to just measure units sold per quarter."

The problem is of course that Google doesn't know that figure so they measure what they can measure and explain very little. I am more interested why Android seems to be doing so badly in the net usage figures. If they are "activating" as many devices as they claim why is their usage at 0.20%?

http://www.asymco.com asymco

Spot on. So why should everybody use this bogus, vague and misleading figure of "activation" since it only suits Google? Apple should not get baited by this.

Gandhi

"The problem is of course that Google doesn’t know that figure "

You mean to tell me that Google, whose core competency is gathering data, with or without your permission, who is under investigation in multiple jurisdictions in multiple countries for breach of privacy rules, does not know how to measure activations for devices running their own OS? Are you serious?!

http://twitter.com/hmbshark @hmbshark

Samsung and all of Google's Android partners (presumably) haven't shared sales information with Google. Therefore, Google uses what it has, which is their phone software activations.

min

The problem with not responding is that you leave pundits with an axe to grind against (insert favorite company here) credibility. Silence can be interpreted to mean "true", at least in the eyes of the gullible "fake Obama birth certificate" party. You can't just stay silent on net neutrality and expect the result you want.

Niilo

I could be wrong, but I am guessing that Google does know the devices that each Android instance is activated on. Would be very useful for them to know the hardware the OS is running on and would be trivial to collect that data at activation, also with device serial number or even IMEI?

I'd be interested to know who the leading Android vendors are, ie if you consider Android as a separate market, who is shipping what kinds of volumes. Not commonly reported. I'm sure that MOT and HTC are in the mix, but then we also have SEMC, the Koreans, ZTE, Huawei, China Inc…